Commsor raises $16 million to unlock insights from companies’ online communities

Community is at the heart of many businesses, whether we’re talking about customers, coders, or brand superfans. Harnessing community involvement to its full potential can support customer acquisition, retention, loyalty, and support. But managing the various community touchpoints, such as GitHub repositories, newsletters, social networks, Slack, and a Discourse forum, can be a laborious process. And it can be especially difficult to garner any meaningful insights manually.

That’s why Commsor is setting out to help community teams generate insights from what is a potential gold mine of data by connecting to all the tools they currently use. To advance its effort, the startup today announced $16 million in a series A round of funding — at a valuation “well north of $100 million” — led by Felicis Ventures and Seven Seven Six.

Community operating system

Founded in 2019, Commsor touts itself as a “community operating system” that ties together a company’s community data to help it understand who its members are and what channels they’re using to engage with the company. A typical user is likely to be a full-time community manager or team, though someone in areas from marketing to customer experience could also use it.

To set things up, a company connects Commsor to third-party APIs such as Slack, GitHub, Twitter, or virtual events platforms like Hopin. Then Commsor pulls all the data in and connects the dots to create profiles of a community. This could show that a specific member is active on Slack and GitHub, for example, and regularly attends a company’s virtual events.

Above: Commsor: Building community profiles to generate insights

The platform also includes a resolution pipeline that handles deduplication, which helps ensure a GitHub repo community member is correctly correlated to their Twitter or Slack profile.

Commsor also makes it possible to dig down into specific platforms to see who the most active members are, which can help inform reach-out programs, for example.

Above: Commsor: measuring platform-specific community impact

On the surface, all of this sounds a lot like a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, but Commsor cofounder and CEO Mac Reddin disagrees.

“The big underlying difference compared to a CRM is that a CRM looks at relationships in a silo, while Commsor looks at both the relationship between a company and a community member, but also the relationship and impact that user has on the broader community,” Reddin told VentureBeat.

Although Commsor can be used by any type of business, Reddin said it’s particularly focused on the enterprise/B2B segment for now, with customers that include corporate expense company Spendesk and automated software testing startup Testim.

What Commsor brings to the mix is measurability. It can be hard to quantify the impact of community-building on a company’s bottom line, which is why one of Commsor’s clients has used the platform to show its growth team that the community initiatives it’s running are driving leads for the sales team.

“Companies care more than ever about building genuine community around themselves, but it’s traditionally really hard to truly measure and understand the impact that community has on their business,” Reddin continued. “For community teams, it’s really about being able to prove that impact and convert community metrics into metrics that other companies care about.”

With a fresh $16 million in the bank, Commsor plans to expand its team and grow the number of third-party integrations it offers, which currently sits at 215.